2005-06

Few themes in moral and political philosophy have been the subject of more intense
discussions in recent years as the question of how justice is to be conceived at the global
level. The aim of the seminar is to explore and discuss this literature with the hope of
providing an answer to the following two questions:

1. Should global justice be conceived as social justice writ large, in the sense that the principles of justice we accept on a national scale should be extended to mankind as a whole (Beitz, Pogge, etc.) or should global justice be conceived as inter-national justice, in a sense that requires developing principles for the just interaction between nations fundamentally different from those defining inter-individual justice within nations (Rawls, Nagel, etc.)?
2. Whether we adopt the first or second answer to the first question, how should the principles of global justice be specified so that they can guide national and supranational policy in such areas as migration, international trade, development aid or the global environment ?

September 23, 2005: Louvain-La-NeuveBrief presentation of the purpose and method of the seminar
Pranab BARDHAN, professor at the department of economics,University of California Berkeley, Globalization and the World's Poor

October 14, 2005: Louvain-La-NeuveDoes worldwide inequality grow and is it unjust?
André DECOSTER on the empirical controversies around worldwide
poverty and inequality;
Toon VANDEVELDE on Rawls’s theory of global justice.

November 4, 2005: LeuvenThe debate about Rawls’ Law of Peoples
Philippe VAN PARIJS on Beitz’s and Pogge’s critiques of Rawls
Toon VANDEVELDE on Nagel’s 2005 restatement of the central issue

November 18, 2005: Louvain-La-Neuve
Four conceptions of global distributive justice
John ALEXANDER (KuLeuven) on global justice according to Sen and Nussbaum
Philippe VAN PARIJS on global justice according to John Roemer and Real Freedom for All

March 24, 2006: LeuvenDavid MILLER, Oxford University
Conference on Nationalism and Global Justice : the Political Theory of David Miller.
Session 1: Nationalism and National Responsibility
Session 2: Global Justice